This video of Beau’s arrest for wearing a hat in court (charged with direct criminal contempt) and the subsequent “right of alocution” hearing shows some important things about the NH liberty movement today. Continue reading after the video for analysis:
The good news: The numbers of liberty-oriented people moving to and getting active in NH are growing, and those willing to take a risk are increasing. There is strength in numbers, and the more of us there are that are willing to laugh at the aggressors as well as noncooperate and disobey, the more they lose their precious legitimacy and control. The robed man in this video, Edward Burke, desperately attempts to flex his power by attempting to clear the courtroom.
The bad news: Burke is largely successful at clearing the court. (more…)
As a result of pending anti-union legislation, and my ongoing project to build a liberal-libertarian alliance, I have been researching union issues for the last few weeks. Historically, libertarians, in a political coalition with business interests on the right, have opposed unions, but is there room to ally with liberals here? (more…)
Journalists are often forced to oversimplify the blurry, confusing reality of the Keene libertarian movement due to constraints on time and newspaper space. Local liberty activists sometimes oversimplify, too– or are even misinformed themselves. This can create frustrating misconceptions, so it’s good to clarify the relationship between the different activists and organizations and activities every once in a while.
Last night’s WMUR report provides some perfect examples of possibly misleading simplifications. (Not to pick on them– I think they summarized the situation fairly, all things considered.)
WMUR claims that Free Keene is an “offshoot” of the Free State Project. Is it? (more…)
I’ve been having a conversation with a smart person pretending to be an idiot over on the Free State Project forum. Generally, the only point of an argument with someone who ignores logical and rational thought is for the benefit of the audience. Presumably at least some of those seeing the discussion will be rational and will gain something from the exchange, even if it’s just the realization that one of the people is full of shit. However, there was an added benefit to this otherwise seemingly hopeless attempt to have a rational discussion. I realized that a misinterpretation of a key term in the discussion has corrupted the entire debate.
In 2003, security analyst Bruce Schneier introduced the concept of security theater: “Security theater refers to security measures that make people feel more secure without doing anything to actually improve their security. An example: the photo ID checks that have sprung up in office buildings. No-one has ever explained why verifying that someone has a photo ID provides any actual security, but it looks like security to have a uniformed guard-for-hire looking at ID cards. Airport-security examples include the National Guard troops stationed at US airports in the months after 9/11 — their guns had no bullets. The US colour-coded system of threat levels, the pervasive harassment of photographers, and the metal detectors that are increasingly common in hotels and office buildings since the Mumbai terrorist attacks, are additional examples.”
Security theater is driven by political forces: the public demands that the government do something to provide more security. This demand is passed on to representatives, who rely on the the positive perception of voters to get re-elected. Naturally, when they are being judged on these grounds, they maximize the appearance of security rather than security itself.
Over the last few years, Keeniacs have witnessed the growth of a similar phenomenon– activism theater. Activism theater refers to activist measures that make people feel like government policy is being improved without doing anything to actually improve government policy. (Even if the goal is no government, that requires a change in government policy, from what we have today to the absence of any government action.) Examples of activism theater are the School Sucks Project “outreach” and City Hall drinking games. Both of these were billed as activism, and yet there’s no plausible mechanism through which they could have changed anything– their activism guns had no bullets. (more…)
It’s the end of an era. I’m sad to announce that Russell and Kat Kanning have moved out of New Hampshire. Songwriter and poet Richard Onley also just recently left. OTN’s Sam Dodson is leaving soon. Of course, they aren’t the only activists to have come and gone over the years, but they are well-known for their valuable contributions to the NH liberty movement.
News like this in tandem with the Free State Project‘s cancellation of the popular Liberty Forum event can certainly be a downer, even if you didn’t know all four activists personally, as I did. Does this signal the doom of the NH liberty movement and the failure of the Free State Project? Well, only the latter in that the FSP failed to put their event together, but that’s an indictment of the FSP’s bureaucratic and ineffective board, not of the concept of moving together for liberty. That’s the idea behind the FSP, and the early movers have proven that it is working.
There were unprecedented successes in just the last year-or-so in both politics (Knife ban repealed, 12 FSP participants and dozens more liberty-friendly granite staters elected to State Rep seats) and civil disobedience (Hundreds openly smoking cannabis without incident at events organized by liberty activists). More importantly, people are moving in greater numbers than ever before. More families and couples are coming these days as opposed to the initial influx of single, unattached males. For instance, a new couple in Keene are buying duplexes in town and families have moved into Dublin and the Peterborough area. What matters most is not who leaves, but who is coming to be part of the next wave of activism, and who stays. It’s a movement full of individuals with different stories. Many will come, and some will go. But why do they go? Here are some common reasons. (more…)
